This is the story of two worlds. One world is that of Jessica, who is on a ScotRail train this Thursday, travelling to Royal Troon Golf Club for the Open Championship. As the organizer of the tournament, the R&A has recommended that spectators use public transport to avoid congestion on the roads and reduce the carbon footprint of the tournament.
The second world takes place high above the clouds. It is the world of top golfers, private jet owners and NetJets users. According to NetJets, eight of the last ten Open champions alone have travelled on the company’s aircrafts, and more than 50 golf professionals use the service each year. NetJets is an official sponsor of the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour until 2028 and, as of this year, is also an official sponsor of the Open Championship.
Organizers publish hardly any data
The issue of athletes and spectators travelling to a sporting event is generally a sensitive one in terms of sustainability. Data on this topic is difficult to find, as it is published by only a few tournament organizers. The Waste Management Open Sustainability Report from 2022 states a CO2 value of 74,955 tC02e for fan transportation and 135,6 tCO2 for player transportation.
The R&A’s sustainability team has been measuring the carbon footprint of the Open Championship for several years, but has not yet published the results. The European Tour Group also provides an insight into this topic in its Sustainability Report for 2023. The CO2 footprint was determined for ten tournaments, with the Advanced Travel and Accommodation segment accounting for 80.72% of the total value of 8077 tons of CO2e. This includes “travel and accommodation for media, guests, VIPs and sponsors, players, their teams and spectators.”
Fans should compensate for travel
Mobility is the elephant in the room when it comes to sustainable events in sport. For this reason, the DP World Tour has developed a tool together with the Hamburg-based company AG GreenTeC in 2024, which gives ticket holders of twelve DP World Tour tournaments the opportunity to offset the carbon footprint of their trip by purchasing Gold Standard carbon credits.
“There will always be unavaoidable emissions when staging golf tournaments that attract thousands of fans over multiple days,” explained Maria Grandinetti-Milton, Head of Sustainability at the European Tour Group, when the program was announced. With this statement, she represents the majority opinion in sport. Although tournament calendars and thus travel can be optimized, athletes and their fans – just like visitors of concerts, musicians or art fans – will always travel to pursue their profession or admire their favourite artist.
What is sustainable sponsorship?
However, the question of the use of private planes or the sponsoring of companies that are emitting high amounts of CO2 is viewed differently in the golf business. The latter group includes, for example, oil companies such as Saudi Aramco and airlines such as NetJets. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest, we should disallow unhealthy products to promote themselves through sport,” explains Canadian scientist Madeleine Orr in her book “Warming Up”, published in 2024.
She is referring not only to the ban on tobacco advertising, which also led to numerous tobacco companies dropping out as major sponsors of tournaments in golf, but also to the current sponsorship of sporting events by the oil industry and other corporate segments such as “airlines and the car industry”.
The question of the extent to which this sponsorship is beneficial to the image of golf is one that the industry has been grappling with for some time. “I believe, if sports leagues and teams really want to demonstrate leadership on climate, they need to hold their sponsors to a much higher standard than they do now,” Lewis Blaustein, founder of the Green Sports Blog and the athletes’ association Eco Athletes, is quoted on this topic.
Reduction before compensation
The Open Championship’s new sponsorship agreement with NetJets falls into this area, even if the R&A explains the cooperation by stating that NetJets committed to CO2 neutrality in 2008 and achieved this in 2012. However, this neutrality is based on a company program to offset the CO2 footprint. This does not meet the common demand of climate scientists that sporting events must first work on reducing their carbon footprint before offsetting unavoidable emissions. It is undisputed that almost all of the spectators or players who fly in comfortably by helicopter or private plane to the Open Championship these days could just as easily travel by normal airlines or possibly by car.
Some of the pros are also aware of this fact: “I also know that I’m not CO₂-neutral during the year now,” explained German pro Marcel Siem, also competing at Royal Troon this week, in an interview with Golf Sustainable in 2023. “But I pay for my carbon footprint at the end of the year and try to tackle the issue. I think it’s super important, and I also want to be a role model for my children.” They are quite critical when it comes to flights. “They talk to me, for example, when players use a private plane. Then they tell me that it simply makes a huge difference whether one person or 300 are on a plane.”
Ultimately, how credible golf’s sustainability efforts are to the outside world is also likely to play a role for the sport and its public image. Martin Slumbers, CEO of the R&A until the end of 2024, philosophized about the sustainability of the event when discussing “the impact substantial increases in men’s professional prize money are having on the perception of the sport and its long-term financial sustainability.”
Alignment of base and top segment
This point applies not only to the topic of prize money, but also to all other areas of the broad field of sustainability. Especially for mobility at tournaments as the biggest CO2 factor. Why should the golf-enthusiastic spectator Lizzy Brown make the arduous 60-minute bike ride to Royal Troon or board a full train when at the same time the comfortable journey by private plane is being promoted elsewhere. “If you look at golf as a pyramid, however strong the pyramid is at the top, it can only be sustained in the long term if the pyramid is equally strong at the base,” explained Martin Slumbers. At this point, he spoke about the provision of funding not only for the professional but also for the amateur sector.
Transferred to other areas of sustainability, however, this also means that the standards applied to the average golfer and average spectator are also relevant for the top segment, for example players and VIPs. The world of private planes and helicopters and that of bicycles and trains are currently far apart.
Image: We-ko-Pa/Petra Himmel